In another bid Make cloud computing Eco-friendly Google has created a new tool that encourages customers choosing the following cloud regions to choose a more sustainable infrastructure.
The Google Cloud Region Picker automatically recommends cloud regions based on three factors: carbon footprint, cost, and latency.
In another bid Make cloud computing Eco-friendly Google has created a new tool that encourages customers choosing the following cloud regions to choose a more sustainable infrastructure.
When users browse the options for managing cloud computing resources, Google will flag the areas with the least carbon impact, highlighted with a leaf symbol and a “minimum CO2” label.
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This new feature has already appeared as part of the location selector in the cloud console. This allows Google customers to manage a variety of factors that power cloud applications, from invoices to databases through cloud regions.
To earn the Green Honor Badge, you must achieve at least a 75% Carbon Free Energy Percentage (CFE%) in a particular cloud region. This is a data center in the area where, on average, renewable energy is used for three-quarters of the time.
If no information about CFE% is available, the region should instead show low grid carbon strength. This corresponds to the average emissions produced by the local grid when fossil fuel energy needs to be used. This can vary widely from region to region and has a direct impact on the sustainability of the data center in that region.
Advertising to the cloud giant earlier this year Released a dataset containing most of the region’s hourly CFE% and grid carbon intensities To reflect the average combination of carbon-free and fossil fuel energy used to power data centers in different cloud regions.
CFE% is calculated based on the amount of carbon-free energy produced in the local grid and the amount of renewable energy that may result from purchases by Google.
Therefore, a high CFE% indicates that the region has been operating on green power for a longer period of time. Discrepancies between different regions are significant. For example, Singapore has the lowest rating of 3%, while Oregon has a CFE% of 89%.
CFE% is an important indicator of accountability for Google’s goals. Operate business with carbon-free energy anytime, anywhere by 2030..
Since 2017, Google claims to match 100% of the world’s electricity consumption with solar energy and energy. The company effectively supplements its overall electricity consumption by purchasing the same amount of electricity from carbon-free sources anywhere in the world. However, this is different from running a data center on renewable energy every hour of every day.
Therefore, by looking at how much renewable energy is being supplied to Google’s data centers hourly each day, CFE% is the first step in understanding the company’s cloud carbon dioxide emissions in real time. I will.
According to Google, the next challenge is to incorporate this new data into the decisions business leaders make when choosing their next cloud region. The company began experimenting with displaying information in a cloud console and found that users exposed to the extended region picker were 19% more likely to choose a “low carbon” region for their cloud services.
“These results show that displaying carbon information in the context of making a decision to choose a region can help us make more sustainable decisions.” Steren Giannini, Product Manager at Google Cloud, said:..
This new feature, in addition to another tool released earlier this year by Google, guides customers to more environmentally friendly choices. This feature is called the Google Cloud Region Picker Automatically recommend cloud regions based on three factors Users can weigh carbon footprint, cost, and latency from “not important” to “important.”
In short, customers can define the “carbon footprint” element as “important” to see where they host their applications and reduce their environmental impact. However, the tool also takes into account other important factors for business leaders, such as the price of services in various areas and the physical distance between the customer’s end user and the region.
For example, if you are looking for a region with low carbon dioxide emissions, low cost, and low latency for end users based in the United States. Region picker We recommend hosting your application in Google’s US-West1 region of Oregon. Carbon-free energy is used on average 89% of the time in the region, and the price of the service is $ 0.021811 per vCPU hour.
Google hopes that Region Picker will help cloud customers better understand how CFE% works and whether it can be included in their business options.
According to an independent survey by search giants, 9 out of 10 IT leaders in the world plan to report or are currently reporting on sustainability indicators, a quarter of which have reduced emissions over the past year. We are accelerating the project.
Over 50 Google Cloud customers have revalued their IT assets over the past year to see their impact on carbon. For example, IT services company SADA Systems has redesigned its cloud strategy based on CFE% in different regions.
Google’s commitment to the green cloud is not unmatched. While Amazon is aiming for 100% renewable energy by 2030, Microsoft is also working on a new approach to reducing the company’s carbon dioxide emissions. For Stuart Adler, an assistant professor at the Institute of Clean Energy at the University of Washington, this shows that there is a reason to be optimistic about the future of the cloud.
“If you look at one sector that can have a big impact and has the will to do it and the resources to do it, it’s a cloud business,” Adler told ZDNet. “That is the source of my optimism.”
However, a strong commitment To ensure that the green cloud market emerges, it needs to be aligned with large investments in new technologies., According to Adler. There are many hurdles left on the road, and cloud giants need to double their innovation to reach that goal.
Google’s new cloud computing tools help you choose the most environmentally friendly data center
Originally published at Illinois news today